New paper: Reusable interaction practices in JOT
Capturing and Organizing Reusable Interaction Practices Using Justification and Feature Models was published in the Journal of Object Technology (JOT), volume 25, number 3.
The paper reports on a qualitative case study run inside the EMPOWrD project, where design knowledge about interacting with older adults lives mostly in people’s heads. Capturing that knowledge as justification diagrams makes it reviewable; organizing the diagrams as a product line with feature models makes it selectable; and jPipe’s composition operators then assemble a coherent argumentation structure from whichever practices a given experiment selects. It is the clearest demonstration so far that jPipe’s composition operators pay off outside a purely technical setting.
Abstract
Engineering teams working on complex socio-technical systems frequently rely on tacit knowledge when addressing stakeholder-specific needs, hindering systematic reasoning about design choices. In this paper, we report on a qualitative case study within the EMPOWrD project to observe how best-practice knowledge can be captured using justification diagrams, a safety-inspired argumentation formalism. We explore the organization of these practices as a configurable product line using feature models to manage their variability. By applying well-defined composition operators, we demonstrate how assembling models from selected practices can automate the construction of coherent argumentation structures. Our observations within the EMPOWrD project, specifically regarding interactions with older adults, illustrate how this integrated modelling approach enables the systematic reuse and justification of practices across different experimental scenarios.
Reference
Sébastien Mosser, Shyam Ravichandran, Kalvin Thuan-Phong Khuu, Brian Detlor, Denise Y. Geiskkovitch, Anne-Marie Pinna-Déry, and P.J. White. Capturing and Organizing Reusable Interaction Practices Using Justification and Feature Models. In Journal of Object Technology (JOT), Volume 25, nº3. July 2026. [JOT]